Dick's picks of Dick's pictures!

Hello. I'm Dick Bower and I like to take pictures
(that will have to do until I find a photographer's anonymous support group in my area).

I've always been interested in photography and have had a professional and personal
interest in computers since before there were personal computers.
The digital camera and the world wide web have made it
possible to combine these interests and make some of my‡ photographs
available to family and friends — both old and new.
‡
Actually, some of "my" best pictures were taken by Annie or Tawna — I try to note that by the picture.
(Tawna took that great picture above of Annie and me.)

The website has smaller versions of the original
pictures — this is mostly to keep the sizes down, but also to
protect my rights to the pictures (all pictures on this site are copyrighted).
If you'd like the full-resolution file or a "screensaver" background, or a print, just let me know and we'll
work something out.
Suggestions are welcome
— just send me an email.

News

Visit the DixPix Facebook page
(@DixPixPicks). Most of our recent stuff will go there first.

Goodies! I've
expanded the items for sale at Cafe Press.
Feel free to poke around, buy some stuff, and suggest other items or pictures.

More Goodies! Now on CafePress,
many new note cards and a few greeting cards!
Check them out!

I've added some "navigation" buttons to the picture pages (those with only one photo).
For each topic that features the photo, there are three buttons: — the middle one
()
takes you "up" to the current picture on the multi-picture topic page,
the other two take you directly to picture that precedes
()
and follows
()
the current picture within the topic.
If you click the topic name, you'll get to the top of the topic page.
It's probably easier to do than explain — try them out on the Seedpods picture.

Best viewed at
1024x768
under the light of the
full moon in July while
Mercury is in Leo and
six Pygmy Marmosets do
the Lambada behind you
singing "Kumbaya."‡

Topics

For now, I've
organized the website into topics, each with a summary page, and detail
pages for each picture. The topics come in three flavors —
Collections of unrelated pictures,
Studies of particularly favorite places or things, and
Events, "documenting" a one-time event or trip.
I expect to be adding pictures to the collections and studies from time to time.
The events probably won't change, but may go away as time passes.

Let me know if you think of a better way to organize it! —
email me with
your thoughts!

One downside of the "topics" approach, is that some pictures end up
duplicated… if that bothers you, or you just want to look
for pictures that interest you — check out:

Technology

This wouldn't be any
fun without a little programming work. For now, the pages are created
statically by perl scripts on my home machine. The scripts are driven
by semi-automatically generated description files and HTML
templates. Eventually, I'd like to generate the pages at the
server–based on a database containing similar picture and
page information. Manually generated pages (and prototypes) are
developed with Mozilla's Nvu.

The pictures are cropped and enhanced as needed, typically with Qimage
Pro, then these full-resolution originals are resized for the
appropriate pages. For this, I usually use ImageMagick called
from a perl script. I also use CAM2PC
for this and lots more. More drastic editing is sometimes required; for
this I usually use Photoshop CS2.